The present invention relates to a technique for dividing a file and storing it in a plurality of storage devices.
In the field of storage technologies, there are known, for example, a technology called striping, and a technology involves dividing one set of data into a number of fragments, which divided fragments are then distributed to a number of storage devices for storage. Literature describing the latter technology includes “Survivable Information Storage Systems”, COMPUTER, (US), IEEE COMPUTER SOCIETY, August 2000.
According to technologies of this kind, since data is fragmented, if any of the storage devices should be cracked, it will nevertheless be difficult to reconstruct the original data, thereby providing improved security.
However, with the conventional technology described above, a considerable number of storage devices are needed, depending on the number of fragments into which a file is divided. Thus, when a large number of fragments are used in order to enhance security, there is a commensurate increase in the number of storage devices required, and costs are entailed thereby. Another issue with the conventional technology described above is that if even a single storage device should experience a fault, it becomes impossible to reconstruct the data.